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News Genius controversy around harassing female writers now includes a letter from Congress

Annotation website Genius has been at the center of a brewing media controversy.

On Tuesday, the whole situation jumped up a notch thanks to a letter from a sitting congresswoman.

Representative Katherine Clark of the 5th District of Massachusetts penned a letter to Genius CEO and cofounder Tom Lehman to express concerns about "the Genius online annotation platform and its lack of safeguards against Internet harassment and abuse."

Image: Katherine Clark

Genius, which started out as a website to annotate rap lyrics, has been building out a larger editorial operation in hopes of reaching a larger audience.

The company now provides a tool that can annotate any page on the web, right on the page. As long as users are logged into Genius, they can see annotations on every article and site.

The new position created by Genius had many in media expecting a journalistic effort that added factual detail or questions to stories and commentary, but recently the annotations have taken an editorializing tone.

Concern over bullying

After a bit of a quiet period, Finnegan has been stirring up controversy recently by aggressively annotating articles found on a variety of websites.

In one case, journalist Sara Morrison annotated an article about a young female writer, Ella Dawson, who has herpes simplex-I, leading some to claim that the comments had crossed from annotation or critique into bullying. Finnegan also provided some annotations on the piece.

The annotations — which Finnegan appeared to defend from the News Genius brand Twitter account — ignited a multi-day conversation on Twitter. Many took exception to the harsh, personal annotations that to many, reprised the habitual harassment that women face online, which ranges from "gaslighting" their concerns to diminishing the importance of women's experiences and writing.

Dawson was the first to ask for controls on the new use of Genius after Finnegan's annotations.

I'm really uncomfortable with the trend of people (esp cis, straight, white people) annotating blog posts and articles using Genius.

In another case, Finnegan annotated another young female writer's piece about being single with what many took as false concern — or "concern trolling," — about whether the writer, Alana Massey, needed help.

Representative Clark noted that Genius, which grew out of the popular Rap Genius annotation tool, has some positive uses, but also pointed to downsides, including, as Dawson mentioned, that the tool does not allow websites to block Genius.

Updated: 5:02 P.M. EST, March 28, 2016: This piece was updated to reflect that Sara Morrison along with Leah Finnegan annotated a blog post from Ella Dawson. An editing mistake cited Finnegan as the author of tweets from News Genius's brand account, which the company denies.

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